The present study examined the effects of a 9-month randomized control physical activity intervention aimed at improving cardiorespiratory fitness on changes in working memory performance in preadolescent children relative to a waitlist control group. Participants performed a modified Sternberg task, which manipulated working memory demands based on encoding set sizes, while task performance an...

Hierarchical predictive coding suggests that attention in humans emerges from increased precision in probabilistic inference, whereas expectation biases attention in favor of contextually anticipated stimuli. We test these notions within auditory perception by independently manipulating top-down expectation and attentional precision alongside bottom-up stimulus predictability. Our findings supp...

OBJECTIVE The main aim was to track the dynamics of pattern-learning using single-trial event-related potentials (ERPs). A new 'learning-oddball' paradigm was employed presenting eight random targets (the 'no-pattern') followed by eight regular targets (the 'pattern'). In total, six repetitions of the 'no-pattern' followed by the 'pattern' were presented. METHODS We traced the dynamics of lea...

Economics takes an individualistic approach to human behaviour. This is reflected in the use of 'contingent valuation' surveys conduct cost benefit analysis for economic policy evaluation. An individual's valuation a assumed be unaffected by burdens it places on others. We report survey experiment test this supposition context climate change policy. Willingness pay mitigation was higher when ri...

consumers’ willingness to pay for nonmarket commodities such as wildlife, quality of the environment and forest services (including timber production, water conservation, soil conservation, oxygen supply, carbon sequestration, recreation services and wildlife preservation) is a measure of value of these resources. in recent years the contingent valuation has been used to determine this and othe...

according to the increasing importance of green space and environment, decision making of environmental policy is growing at the national level and internationally, so there is an urgent need for information that could be used to promote efficient environmental decision making. in this study the economic benefits associated with eram garden of shiraz, is estimated using a double-bounded dichoto...

In contingent planning problems, agents have partial information about their state and use sensing actions to learn the value of some variables. When sensing and actuation are separated, plans for such problems can often be viewed as a tree of sensing actions, separated by conformant plans consisting of non-sensing actions that enable the execution of the next sensing action. This leads us to p...

Event-related covariance (ERC) patterns were computed from pre-stimulus and feedback intervals of a bimanual, visuomotor judgment task performed by 7 right-handed men. Late contingent negative variation (CNV) ERC patterns that preceded subsequently accurate right- or left-hand responses differed from patterns that preceded subsequently inaccurate responses. Recordings from electrodes placed at ...

We present a model of life-insurance purchase that takes into account the age of the beneficiary. The beneficiaries considered herein are young children with no resources whose consumption needs are protected by purchasing life insurance if the breadwinner dies. We show that income transfer grows as the child ages; however, the size of contingent bequest shrinks because the need for protection ...